helene

Helene-Free Friday

We are fortunate indeed that I could even think of titling today’s update “Helene-Free Friday.” I guess it’s not entirely accurate: the Boy and I did go out and get an enormous bit of wood that we’ll use as our chopping block in the future, but other than that, Helene didn’t impact our day that much.

Other than the fact that we still have friends family staying with us.

Of course, we’re more than glad to help those we love, but it does come with certain advantages to us: three Polish women can make a batch of pierogi (we had leftover mashed potatoes from last night — what else would we do with them?) in almost no time at all.

Most of the evening, though, we spent getting ready for our Chicago trip. We fly out at 6:30 tomorrow morning and arrive back here at 9:30 Sunday. We’ve got our walking tour planned for tomorrow,

and Cocia M is ready to take E for his early game tomorrow morning.

Wednesday After Helene

There was more progress in the neighborhood today: the two trees blocking our road no longer are, and more importantly, the power up the street (due to the downed lines of those two trees) has been restored.

“Has been restored” — the most pathetic use of passive voice ever. Linesmen restored it. Men who are working twelve to fourteen hours every day to bring power back to the millions in the south who lost it.

We should all find one linesman and buy him dinner when this is all over. Each linesman would get dozens of evenings out. Probably hundreds. And we still wouldn’t have repaid them.

On our property, I worked today to remove the dam of debris that formed in our backyard creek. It was about five feet high and seemed like it would completely block the water the next time we had a heavy rain — so it had to go. I’ll finish it up tomorrow.

And in the evening, soccer practice and a walk around the fields. Surprisingly little damage there: almost no trees down at all.

Tuesday After the Storm

Our street has been blocked since Friday morning when Helene took down the tree I’d expected to fall for at least five years.

“When are they going to take care of that?” L asked. “When are they going to get rid of that tree,” E asked. The answer was simple, like so many things in Helene’s wake: “I don’t know.”

We kept reminding them about fortunate we are: we had power back the same day we lost it. We never lost water. We have a home that “flooded” with about two inches of water at most, and in the basement, where we’d already prepared for just that much flooding.

Today, though, the linesmen began working in our neighborhood. They took care of the broken power pole behind our house and cleared the tree blocking our road (though that was the city’s work, I guess).

And we decided it was time to do some exploring. We headed back along the creek that we’ve always called our adventuring area. There was a waterfall there that spilled over some rocks and enormous roots of two trees that towered over everything.

Those two trees, however, were casualties of Helene. Minor casualties, to be sure: they were tall enough to take out a bit of fencing in a backyard on our street, but that’s nothing compared to the death toll that’s in the Carolinas.

Heading back home, we noticed another change: without the enormous tree that was hanging over our street (and the blocking our street), our street looks a lot different.

It’s not the only thing in the south that looks different thanks to Helene.

Monday After

Today my friend and I took a bike ride over to the school where we teach. We’d heard that our school was completely inaccessible, and we wanted to see what that looked like.

Our route took us through one of the more exclusive areas of our town, a neighborhood where few (if any) houses sell for less than seven figures. Even our house there would be valued probably 2.5 times what it is here.

The road was, at times, virtually impassable:

We saw some startling effects of the storm. One house seemed to have almost a magic power over the tree that fell in its yard. It damaged only a bit of the gutter on both the stand-alone garage and the corner of the house.

Their neighbors, however, were not so fortunate:

We made it to our school and saw just how blocked it was:

Other than some trees that were in the car line (and have since been removed), there was nothing.

But still the announcement came today: school is officially out for the rest of the week. No e-learning. No nothing.

Second Day After

The second day after the devastation of Helene was for me a day of cleaning again. Yesterday I’d started making piles of brush throughout the backyard. Today, I moved it all to the street. I left a couple of piles because they were primarily old wood (as opposed to the mostly-green wood I took out to the street) because I thought we might be able to make an ognisko from it all — or several, in point of fact.

But the most important event of the day was that we were finally able to get in touch with Ciocia M and her daughter C (essentially K’s sister and L’s cousin) in Asheville, a town which had received about the worst of the flooding here in the southeast. Two rivers run though Asheville, and they of course both flooaded. The Swannanoa River swelled to 27 feet above its normal level, wiping out the road that leads to M’s home.

We’d been trying to get in touch with M since yesterday, but we’d had no luck. We finally got to talk to her today, and our message was clear: if you can get out safely (which, from our research, seemed entirely do-able), get down here now. So M and C packed up some of the food in their fridge, put the cat in the cat carrier, and headed down.

Shortly after she arrived, A, another of K’s Polish sisters, arrived.

“Can we get you anything?” K asked.

“Tea,” A said, without hesitation. Her family has been without power since Friday, and a Polish woman who’s lived without hot tea for that long has one thing on her mind. But K, being Polish herself, had other things on her mind: “Of course, you’re staying for dinner, right?”

Soon, A’s husband P called. “Come for dinner!” we said, not making it a request or an option but rather a requirement. A demand, even.

P arrived and it was soon like all the Christmases and Easters our three families have spent together. P and I had a couple of beers and some laughs; the ladies had white wine and some laughs — hopefully everyone felt better when it was all said and done.

It’s a strange feeling having a mini-party in the midst of all this misery and devastation. The images coming out of the area where I grew up, for example, show the far-reaching effects of super-charged Helene. People have lost their homes, and some have lost their lives. But we have to be grateful for what we have, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge us for some relaxing laughs that set everyone’s spirits a bit at ease.

After P and A left, we took Ciocia M to the living room and taught her to play golf on the Switch. And thus we ended our first night together.

The question — the concern — haunting M’s thoughts is simple: how long will they have to stay with us? They’re welcome to stay as long as necessary, but that’s not really the issue. How long will conditions keep them out of their home?

Asheville is bad: Greenville is heavily damaged, but Asheville is simply wrecked. “It’s like the apocalypse,” M said. Water lines are broken; power lines are down everywhere; the winds blew down countless trees; rivers have deposited tons of mud on all the streets; flood waters have swept away buildings and cars then totaled buildings they left behind. It will take months to get everything back to some semblance of normal.

And for C? Her senior year is now thrown into doubt. How will they possibly be able to go to school? How will they make up the lost time?

These are of course questions no one can answer. All the steps ahead of everyone working on the recovery effort: before power can be restored, the damaged lines and poles must be accessible. This means the fallen trees have to go. But can the crews get to all the trees given the bog that Asheville has turned into? So many pieces to coordinate. And this is happening in communities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

The commentators are right: this is our Katrina,

The First Day After

Yesterday everyone was accepting the fact, I assume, that we’ll be without power for some time. That was what I was thinking. “We’ll be without power a couple of days, maybe three,” I thought. And I was so pleasantly surprised when we got power back yesterday evening. In the back of my mind, though, I thought that perhaps lots of people would be coming back online today. I knew it was unlikely, but what we know to be the case and what we want to be the case often come into conflict, and we like our cognitive comfort, so we choose the easier, less-likely alternative.

This morning passed as every Saturday morning in the house, which only reinforced that thinking. K Skyped with Babcia; I spent some time grading papers; the kids slept. The only real difference was that we were all using cellular data as the internet had gone out overnight. Most of our late morning and afternoon was just like any other Saturday as well: K worked in the house; I worked in the yard.

The main difference: my yard work consisted of cleaning up the mess Helene left behind. And she did leave a mess. Branches were everywhere, of course. But because of the severe flooding in our back yard, all the debris from our yard washed into the back left corner of our yard, trapped by the fence and the debris itself. This meant that that entire corner of our yard was a mixture of previously-mulched leaves, new leaves, old rotting leaves, twigs, branches, and some old logs. It was a mess, and cleaning it up will take more time than I spent today. “A few weekends” I would normally say, but it turns out we have a bit more time than that.

We received a phone-blast from the school district informing us that schools would be closed on Monday and Tuesday. They posted essentially the same thing on the district website:

Greenville County Schools will be closed on Monday, September 30, and Tuesday, October 1. With widespread power and Internet outages, eLearning is not possible. Once we have better estimates of when power and Internet will be restored, we will announce plans for Wednesday.

So we’ll have at least two more days to work on the mess in the backyard. I only segregated everything into piles: wood we can eventually burn on the firepit, brush that we need to take to the roadside, and twigs that fall somewhere in between.

The website message contained details missing in the short phone message, details that make me think it’s all but certain we’ll be out for the entire week:

Stable power and safe transportation are the main factors necessary for resuming in-person school. Once power is restored, cafeteria food supplies must be restocked, which will take a minimum of 48 hours. While clearing roads is necessary, transportation cannot be provided safely with so many traffic signals not working. As it is safe to do so, we are physically checking our locations and prioritizing repairs. We currently have at least 90 schools and offices without power and Internet, with inconsistent power at the other locations.

There are so many trees down that officials have been unable even to reach our school to check on its condition, I learned. Given all the challenges facing us, I doubt we’ll be back in school the following week.

After dinner, we took a walk around the neighborhood and saw how lucky we were. We have a literal forest in our backyard, and all the trees were sitting in completely saturated ground for hours, with the prevailing wind blowing straight through the trees to our house. That not a single tree fell in our yard is almost shocking.

Others were not so lucky. During our walk, we heard chainsaws in the distance, and as we made our way up a curved hill, we saw what was going on: several men were working on a roof, cutting the branches off an enormous tree that had fallen right in the middle of their house. And their neighborhood still has no power, and will likely not have power for a week according to Duke Energy’s estimates.

And that’s to say nothing of the folks in Florida who lost everything. We have family in just that situation: K’s brother’s brother-in-law and family, whom we visited this summer. Their entire house was completely inundated, and just as they’d finished renovating after the last catastrophic loss.

It puts our slight flooding in an entirely different perspective.

Helene

It was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm. We’ve heard that before. Ivan was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm, and by the time it reached us, it was some light wind and a bit of rain. So we were probably all a bit skeptical about what would happen when Helene rolled through.

As with Ivan, we canceled school (rather, it was an “e-learning day,” which means little work in a practical sense). I thought it would be a relatively easy day with few stresses.

And then Helene rolled through: winds up to 70 miles per hour. Eight inches of rain in our city. It was, in short, a disaster. There are trees down by the thousands throughout the city.

The adventure began last night: I stayed up to make sure the rain was not getting too heavy and flooding our basement. I kept checking our sump pump in the crawl space, and every time I looked, it was dry.

“Maybe we’ll make it,” I thought.

This morning K got up early for work and when she saw the basement was still dry, she did some yoga, ate some breakfast, and checked the basement one last time. That’s when she came to wake me up. Surely she envisioned the normal routine: shop vacs going like mad in a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to keep ahead of the flood. That’s surely what she was thinking as she came to wake me up.

And then the power went out.

We spent most of this morning, as a result, trying to get water out of our basement with towels, buckets, and brooms. We worked for hours and seemed to get nowhere. The water in the backyard continued to rise, reaching its highest level ever: a good bit over our trampoline. Still we fought. Eventually, the rain slowed and then stopped, the water went down in the backyard, but we still had water coming into the basement. Around eleven this morning that finally stopped, too.

We went out for a ride to see if anything was open and to see how the town looked. Not good.

Especially Conestee Dam. Conestee is our favorite local park, but it has a dark side: the dam that makes the lake (though now it’s more a swamp with the sediment that has gathered there over the decades) holds back untold tons of toxic waste that textile mills upstream dumped into the Ready River a century ago.

The century-old dam’s structural integrity has been a topic of much discussion locally and in the state capital, and the powers that be have finally taken the first steps to solving the problem. But when I saw what was happening there today, I feared it might be too late.

In the early evening, we saw power company trucks working on our street, and within a few minutes, we had power again. But it’s spotty: the houses on the street that intersects ours are still without power. In the neighborhoods around us, some streets have power and others do not.

Other areas have gotten it worse, though. Asheville, where we used to live and where Cocia M and her daughters live (although the oldest now lives in Charlotte during the school year) got pounded: